Microsoft has announced today that it has reached patent licensing agreements with Acer and ViewSonic that cover Android smart phones and tablets. These companies join HTC [and several others] in paying Microsoft for each deployed Android device. Microsoft's strategic approach to Android is very different from Apple's. Where Apple is attempting to stop or otherwise delay the deployment of Android devices Microsoft is lining their coffers with royalties paid by OEMs for the privilege of shipping them. It's a strategy that is already generating more profit for Microsoft the its less then successful Windows Phone platform and could contribute dramatically to Microsofts bottom line going forward.

one thing Apple has yet to do(?): make the U.S government use their trade agreement to kill international competition

It is becoming more and more apparent recently that at least some IP rules, which as an overall group are the basis of Apple litigation throughout the world, got in place also via US gov and the agreements they push...

Apart from that - killing the clone market was possibly in a similar league? Or: something doesn't ring quite right with the purchase of a company which provided multi-touch products "particularly helpful for people suffering from RSI and other medical conditions" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FingerWorks ) and promptly withdrawing them from the market.

Furthermore, it's worth noting how there was probably something fishy with "push Apple into schools, kids will get used to them, ..." during large part of the 90s at my place (so possibly also at other similar ones, at the least). Some backstage practices / nice sums of money informally changing hands virtually had to be the case, considering the mark-up* of the machines in the face of local economic realities at the time (plus the scale - enough even for both high schools in my irrelevant provincial city; those ~25 machines in total, between the two, most likely being a strong majority - if not all - of Macintoshes in a 20k city BTW), and how such things were done.
("but Macs come with polish qwerty typist's kb layout!" most likely not being enough by itself - polish qwerty programmer's layout, physically identical to US layout, wasn't a problem before or after ...besides, you can find polish qwerty typist's keyboards for PCs, they were just always mostly ignored; plus a coordinated country-wide school deployment could easily order the thousands of units needed even directly from manufacturers)

*not only hellishly expensive for the place... it was also a dumping ground for Mac Classic and LC475. Giving very "fluffy" computer education anyway, and totally disconnected from local ecosystem. With, of course, dubious results of "kids will get used to them" ( http://ranking.pl/en/rankings/operating-systems.html expand the detailed past percentages - that 0.97% is only after massive growth over the past 5 years)